Scientists are trying to predict what might happen if genetically modified salmon escaped growth facilities. It's a scenario often raised by critics who don't want the FDA to approve sale of the fish. Sundström attests that the risk of escape is, for the most part, in the future. "We are expecting very little risk at the moment, because there are very few facilities that actually hold these fish. I think what's a worry to some people is if it becomes commercialized and you find these kind of fish in millions of hatcheries around the world." If that were to happen, he says, the concern is that growers might become lax about containment methods, and then it would just be a matter of time before a fish — or a few — got out.

Creativity is one of humanity’s uniquely defining qualities. Numerous thinkers have explored the qualities that creativity must have, and most pick out two important factors: whatever the process of creativity produces, it must be novel and it must be influential.

The history of art is filled with good examples in the form of paintings that are unlike any that have appeared before and that have hugely influenced those that follow. Leonardo’s 1469 Madonna and child with a pomegranate, Goya’s 1780 Christ crucified or Monet’s 1865 Haystacks at Chailly at sunrise and so on. Others paintings are more derivative, showing many similarities with those that have gone before and so are thought of as less creative.

The job of distinguishing the most creative from the others falls to art historians. And it is no easy task. It requires, at the very least, an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of art. The historian must then spot novel features and be able to recognize similar features in future paintings to determine their influence.

Those are tricky tasks for a human and until recently, it would have been unimaginable that a computer could take them on. But today that changes thanks to the work of Ahmed Elgammal and Babak Saleh at the University of Washington, who say they have a machine that can do just this.

This result—that later mutations were dependent on the earlier ones—demonstrates a feature known as contingency. In other words, mutations that are accepted by evolution are contingent upon previous mutations to ameliorate their effects.

Biochemists from Trinity College Dublin have devised a new technique that will make the difficult but critical job of blueprinting certain proteins considerably faster, easier and cheaper.

The breakthrough will make a big splash in the field of drug discovery and development, where precise protein structure blueprints can help researchers understand how individual proteins work. Critically, these blueprints can show weaknesses that allow drug developers to draw up specific battle plans in the fight against diseases and infections.

Professor of Membrane Structural and Functional Biology at Trinity, Martin Caffrey, is the senior author of the research, which has just been published in the international peer-reviewed journal Acta Crystallographica D.

He said: "This is a truly exciting development. We have demonstrated the method on a variety of cell membrane proteins, some of which act as transporters. It will work with existing equipment at a host of facilities worldwide, and it is very simple to implement."

Over 50% of drugs on the market target cell membrane proteins, which are vital for the everyday functioning of complex cellular processes. They act as transporters to ensure that specific molecules enter and leave our cells, as signal interpreters important in decoding messages and initiating responses, and as agents that speed up appropriate responses.

The major challenge facing researchers is the production of large membrane protein crystals, which are used to determine the precise 3-D structural blueprints. That challenge has now been lessened thanks to the Trinity biochemists' advent - the in meso in situ serial crystallography (IMISX) method.

Beforehand, researchers needed to harvest protein crystals and cool them at inhospitable temperatures in a complex set of events that was damaging, inefficient and prone to error. The IMISX method allows researchers to determine structural blueprints as and where the crystals grow.

Professor Caffrey added: "The best part of this is that these proteins are as close to being 'live' and yet packaged in the crystals we need to determine their structure as they could ever be. As a result, this breakthrough is likely to supplant existing protocols and will make the early stages of drug development considerably more efficient."

Factories are about to get smarter. The machines that make everything from our phones to our sandwiches rely on creaking technology -- but not for long. "We will have a fourth industrial revolution," says professor Detlef Zühlke, a lead researcher in the factories of the future. And that fourth revolution is all about making factories less stupid.

Zühlke and his team have spent the past decade developing a new standard for factories, a sort of internet of things for manufacturing. "There will be hundreds of thousands of computers everywhere," Zühlke tells WIRED.co.uk. "Some of these technologies will be disruptive".

In Germany this impending revolution is known as Industry 4.0, with the government shovelling close to €500m (£357m) into developing the technology. In China, Japan, South Korea and the USA big steps are also being made to create global standards and systems that will make factories smarter. The rest of the world, Zühlke claims, is "quite inactive". Zühlke is head of one of the largest research centers for smart factory technology in the world. The facility, located at the German Artificial Intelligence Research Centre (DFKID) in the south-western city of Kaiserslautern, houses a row of boxes packed with wires and circuitry.

At first it looks like any factory, but then you notice all the machines are on wheels. This, Zühlke explains, is the factory of the future. His vision is based on cyber physical systems, combining mechanical systems with electronics to connect everything together. And the wheels? One day different modules in the factory could potentially drive themselves around to allow factories to alter the production line. For now, moving the modules is done by humans.

The demo factory is currently producing business card holders. Each module performs a different task and they can be rearranged into any order, with the modules able to understand when it is their turn to carry out a task. A storage module feeds into an engraver, a robot arm, a laser marker, a quality control module and so forth. New modules can be added at any time, a process Zühlke compares to playing with Lego.

The idea owes a lot to how we've all been using home computers for years. For more than a decade it has been easy to plug in a new printer or other USB device and have it instantly recognized. On a computer this is known as "plug and play", in a factory Zühlke describes it as "plug and produce". A key breakthrough has been the development of a USB port on an industrial scale, Zühlke explains. This cable, which looks more like a giant hose, sends data and pressurized air to modules in a smart factory, with a control centre receiving information back.

In two years Zühlke expects the first wave of factories using smart technology to be fully operational, with widespread adoption in factories around the world in the next decade. For now, smart factories remain a research project.

Dinosaurs flourished in Europe right up until the asteroid impact that wiped them out 66 million years ago, a new study shows. The theory that an asteroid rapidly killed off the dinosaurs is widely recognized, but until recently dinosaur fossils from the latest Cretaceous--the final stanza of dinosaur evolution--were known almost exclusively from North America. This has raised questions about whether the sudden decline of dinosaurs in the American and Canadian west was merely a local story.

The new study synthesizes a flurry of research on European dinosaurs over the past two decades. Fossils of latest Cretaceous dinosaurs are now commonly discovered in Spain, France, Romania, and other countries. By looking at the variety and ages of these fossils, a team of researchers led by Zoltán Csiki-Sava of the University of Bucharest'sFaculty of Geology and Geophysics has determined that dinosaurs remained diverse in European ecosystems very late into the Cretaceous.

In the Pyrenees of Spain and France, the best area in Europe for finding latest Cretaceous dinosaurs, meat and plant-eating species are present and seemingly flourishing during the final few hundred thousand years before the asteroid hit.

Dr Csiki-Sava said "For a long time, Europe was overshadowed by other continents when the understanding of the nature, composition and evolution of latest Cretaceous continental ecosystems was concerned. The last 25 years witnessed a huge effort across all Europe to improve our knowledge, and now we are on the brink of fathoming the significance of these new discoveries, and of the strange and new story they tell about life at the end of the Dinosaur Era."

Dr Steve Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh's School of GeoSciences (UK), an author on the report, added: "Everyone knows that an asteroid hit 66 million years ago and dinosaurs disappeared, but this story is mostly based on fossils from one part of the world, North America. We now know that European dinosaurs were thriving up to the asteroid impact, just like in North America. This is strong evidence that the asteroid really did kill off dinosaurs in their prime, all over the world at once."

excerpt: "Imagery from search-and-rescue aircraft typically can’t be analyzed prior to landing, whereas drones recently approved by the FAA for civilian use now allow visuals to be streamed live. That’s how DEEMI can rely on a volunteer in, say, Ohio to spot a limb in an image before a pilot maneuvers a drone closer to that specific geolocation, saving “days, hours, minutes and, ultimately, lives,” says Bowie, DEEMI’s director."

Constructor theory is a new vision of physics, but it helps to answer a very old question: why is life possible at all? The early history of evolution is, in constructor-theoretic terms, a lengthy, highly inaccurate, non-purposive construction that eventually produced knowledge-bearing recipes out of elementary things containing none. These elementary things are simple chemicals such as short RNA strands, which can perform only low-fidelity replication, and so do not bear the appearance of design, and are therefore allowed to exist in a pre-biotic environment governed by no-design laws.

Most people agree that hypnosis does something to your brain — specifically something that makes people make fools of themselves at hypnotist shows. But how does it actually affect the human brain? Can it make people recall events perfectly? Are post-hypnotic suggestions a bunch of baloney? What is the truth about hypnotism?

Founded in 2009, Plant-e is perfecting a system originally dreamt up at Wageningen University and patented in 2007. All that the system requires to produce electricity is a plant growing in water, be it mangrove swamps, rice paddies, bogs or simply in a pot or your garden.

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems' High-Energy Liquid Laser Defense System (HELLADS) has gained US government approval and is now on its way to the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico for live-fire tests.

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